Can a liberal female, a stubborn doctor with a bundle of emotional desires to change and reshape the world to her satisfaction, really serve effectively as a mentor to a conservative male? I challenge this entire notion that bias in higher education doesn’t exist. It does. And people like me need strong male role models, not one who try to push emotional buttons of self-loathing in their proteges.
Is there anyone who would be a mentor to me? I wish you to be a conservative male doctor, lawyer, or politician. Ethnicity or religious background has no bearing. I just feel that too many liberal, alpha females with their agendas and “power webs” in academic settings aren’t particularly interested in helping me advance in my career goals.
I am calling my mentor–someone who believes in me as much as I believe in them, someone who wears the same political stripes. If I don’t find you here, I will find you somewhere else. Someone needs to say the truth, and you won’t get that from a fat liberal with a silver spoon in her mouth and a background chock full of entitlement and favoritism.
Mr._Stafford, I don’t really know you so I’m trying not to judge you too harshly. However, remarks that clump all people of any one gender into such a description as you just gave is obnoxious and biased. I’m sorry if your past encounters with strong women have had such a negative impact on you.
Being a strong, liberal, alpha female myself, I take great exception to your general chauvinistic attitude. To be successful in medicine, or any professional organization, you need to develop tolerance for those whose ideas differ from yours. Instead of being so belligerent, try a positive approach to changing opinions.
P.S. I have a growing belief that a major backlash against the accumulating failure and excesses of the ultra-conservative movement is imminent and that an overreliance on such conservative guidance may ultimately prove to be both frustrating and disappointing.
Still, that is just my opinion and I wish you the best.
Whew! Please make sure you post a sign outside your office that let’s women know they aren’t welcome! Perhaps something to the effect of "Welcome to Dr. Stafford’s Office. Conservative Men Please Take A Seat, You Will Be Treated Shortly. Everyone Else Please Leave"
Tammy
Hmmmmm. Mr. Stafford, I believe I have responded to more than one of your queries with supportive information and a general mentor-like attitude. Will you be surprised, then, to find that I am an alpha-female liberal, John Kerry sticker still on my bumper, and oh I’m overweight too? Note: I put myself through college, so the “silver spoon” comment doesn’t apply.
In my years as a nurse, mom, volunteer, student and now physician, I have gotten great satisfaction from helping people and I have never applied any sort of “litmus test” to those I help. Interestingly, you now seem to be applying such a test when you are ASKING for help.
This is not the way to ask for assistance. Harrumph.
Mary
Dude, don’t be a w@nker. You may find out that the value of a mentor extends far beyond personal political views and social goals.
I am a white male and conservative, yet have enjoyed 3 years of having a progressive, lesbian mentor. While we don’t always have the same views, we enjoy lively and informative debates about many subjects. She doesn’t hold my hetero-catholic-conservatism personally against me, any more than I would hold her left-leaning, lesbianism against her. She has shown me a world of biology and research that many stuffed-shirts would have refused me the opportunity to experience. Heck, I have even been offered a paid position this summer helping her with microassay research.
As you don’t want to be judged by your politics (as it would seem by your desire to have only male conservative mentors), don’t be so quick to paint all liberals with the same brush. Besides, folks with your exclusionist stances give the rest of us good conservatives a bad reputation.
If you are going to become a physician, are you prepared to treat everyone? This means liberals, gays, single mothers, drug addicts, jews, moslems, etc. If not, maybe you are looking at the wrong field. You can’t only associate with those patients of like mind.
Hope you find peace,
Racerx
Can a conservative male with identical beliefs and perspective actually challenge you and teach you anything? I am frankly puzzled about your desire for a mentor.
From the attidute of borderline hostility of most of your posts, it seems you have an political axe to grind and you’re full of resentment. It also sounds like you’re not really interested in being mentored – you don’t want to learn anything.
You just want someone to help you move forward.
I thought conservatives believed in moving forward under their own steam? Getting help isn’t that socialist?? And you’re the one who complains your state isn’t helping you!! Ha! They shouldn’t, should they? That would be socialist.
The truth is: we all need help. We can’t do big things alone – and going to medical school certainly qualifies.
I’m a black, liberal, bleeding heart lefty red-diaper baby ‘child of the 60’s’, who is married to a conservative, gun-loving, southern white man with redreck tendencies who has no use for my politics, and I have little for his. So, do we have anything to teach each other? You betcha!
For one thing I’ve learned to tolerate opposing views, I’ve learned to be open and to really listen to someone who is very different from me.
How could two people so different really have anything to offer each other? We both view family and loyalty to be vitally important. We both care about the environment – he as a lifelong hunter, and me as an avid outdoorsperson.
What I have come to realize is that both sides are really essential.
If either the right or the left got all of their ideas followed to an extreme there would be hell to pay.
We balance each other. I used to see conservatives with suspicion, now I really just hate extremism and bigotry on ANY side. I love Bob Dole who served this country with courage and grace on and off the battlefield, and really dislike Bill Clinton who cheated on his wife. I do like Hillary though… so there! hehe!! Edwards/Clinton 2008
I believe as a person and as a future physician that God calls me to serve the poor and those who aren’t ‘profitable’. As a business owner, I also know that you can’t live if you don’t make money.
You have to have resources to be able to help others.
But the scriptures taught me to be a liberal!! To care and to back it up with action. Acts 2:45,Pro 28:27 But I want to act in ways that work. The consequences of a closed mind can be lethal.
So if I were in public health, I’d preach abstinence AND freely give out condoms. What point is there if we let people die of HIV before they have a chance to find God? How can we let people die needlesly whether or not they find god as we undertand god. We can’t impose a death penalty on people just because they don’t follow our morality. That doesn’t seem christian to me! And it’s not practical, not even from a fiscal point of view. I’ve learned that a solution that isn’t practical isn’t spiritual either.
We can’t afford total free market medicine anymore than we can have completely un-incentifized medicine… Why? if we had an even more market driven system, the poor and people with rare or unprofitable conditions would get even less service than they do now. However, were the system to become one where there were absolutely no incentives, people would become descouraged, disinterested in making progress, and like the old (unsuccessful) soviet system, people would ‘pretend to work’ and we would ‘pretend to pay them’.
I find it sad that you, Mr Stafford have locked your mind so much that HALF of the world is irrelevant. Half the planet is female. Half this country is liberal. The other half of Americans may be ‘right’ to some degree, but that doesn’t make them all correct.
The ad hominem (or maybe I should say ad feminem?) comments about emotional women and their agendas is so shrill, emotional and mean it makes me want to laugh. If one goes around calling people names – whole categories of people to boot – one will make no friends. If the people who you need help from dislike you, you will not get the help you need. Not all those who dislike you will be liberals either.
Much truth is in the middle. Answers to real people, being real will always be complicated. The wise person will take what ideas he or she needs, and just leave the rest be.
Life is not as neat as you appear to think it should be. I grew up the child of parents who never had any use for the church. My father was an athiest an an alcoholic. My husband grew up as the son of a minister, and both his parents worked in ministry.
Which one of us do you think is today a ‘card carrying’ “born again” Christian (saved: September 10, 1976)? My husband is an agnostic. Both of us value life. Neither of us thinks abortion is right. Both of us think that, difficult a choice as it is, it should be legal.
It is probably the only major political issue we ‘agree’ on, but our views are quite different, even in agreement.
I’m liberal, he’s conservative, but I think we are both just reasonably balanced realists.
Emotion has a part of every person. Rage is an emotion. Whenever I hear rage, I run in the opposite direction. I don’t care if it comes from the left, or from the right. If conservative values drive your desire to help others, that is fine. If they drive you to hate others, that is not conservative, that is just dumb and distructive.
All the best
Leah
Quote:
Hmmmmm. Mr. Stafford, I believe I have responded to more than one of your queries with supportive information and a general mentor-like attitude. Will you be surprised, then, to find that I am an alpha-female liberal, John Kerry sticker still on my bumper, and oh I’m overweight too? Note: I put myself through college, so the “silver spoon” comment doesn’t apply.
In my years as a nurse, mom, volunteer, student and now physician, I have gotten great satisfaction from helping people and I have never applied any sort of “litmus test” to those I help. Interestingly, you now seem to be applying such a test when you are ASKING for help.
This is not the way to ask for assistance. Harrumph.
Mary
You, Mary, are hilarious!! And quite well-spoken I might add.
Larry
Is this OPM or SDN? Seems like a bit of a baiting to me…
Incidentally, I would argue that having mentors who provide different perspectives than your own can be an incredibly valuable experience, particularly in medicine where you will very seldomly ever have the luxury (at least through most of your education) of picking your patients.
Also, much of the medical school application process is a matter of logistics and strategy. Anyone who has gone through this process successfully has something valuable to contribute to your own attempt.
And finally, getting through this process and going beyond it requires a great deal of emotional and intellectual energy. Your colleagues in the trenches, no matter their political affiliation, may often be your only way to get through it. You should be careful with your positioning and your words that you don’t alienate them with mitigated hostility toward their demographic as a whole.
Mr Stafford,
I just have one question: are you for real?
The responses you got were very respectful, imaginative and enlightening.
Barb
(A left-leaning social justice-seeking individual who put my life savings to support my parents from the time I was 19–so no silver spoon here–no matter their political views, or their views on women, either. They didn’t even want me to go to college – but I guess you’d agree with that.)
Hi there,
Having been educated under the British system where my lecturers were NOT my examiners, it does not matter much to me or anyone else, what the political beliefs of one’s lecturers or mentors are. Information is information and if one has a brain, one can easily separate any “agendas” from information that needs to be mastered for the advancement of career or anything else.
If one is adept at thinking and critical evaluation, one need agree or disagree with opinion and respect the rights of others to have those opinions. If one such as yourself needs the constant “belief of someone in you” then you might try obtaining a dog who would always greet you with unquestioning approval. Most humans especially those who are educated are just not that genre.
Cheers!
njbmd